Every other year, the Joan Whitney Payson Collection is exhibited at the Colby College Museum of Art. The collection of 26 works contains paintings by world-famous Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists. Among the French artists in the collection are Gustave Courbet, Honoré Daumier, J.A.D. Ingres, Claude Monet, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Henri Rousseau, and Alfred Sisley. Paintings, watercolors and drawings by Maurice Prendergast, John Singer Sargent and James McNeill Whistler reflect American artists' interest in the French Impressionist style. Two portraits by the 18th-century English painter Sir Joshua Reynolds and two works by Andrew Wyeth add to the range of the collection.
John Whitney Payson and his family moved the collection to the Portland Museum of Art in 1991. It is on loan to Colby College for one semester every two years.
